Thursday, November 8, 2012

First Trailer for World War Z

World War Z. It was a best-selling book chronicling the aftermath of a worldwide zombie war. Now it's a movie starring Brad Pitt and directed by Marc (Monster's Ball, Quantum of Solace) Forster.

This first trailer for World War Z looks...interesting. For years we had the slow, shambling zombies popularized by George A. Romero's trilogy of Dead films, and continued in the current Walking Dead TV series. After Danny Boyle's terrific 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead, we also have the fast moving zombies. Forster now gives us a third wrinkle, the zombie swarm: like a horde of ants or school of fish, with hundreds, even thousands, of zombies moving extremely fast. (What's next, parkour zombies?)

I wonder if this is going to be a problem with the movie, as the human eye can quickly detect when something is not right with another human figure, which is a huge issue with CGI people in movies today. CGI figures often come off as creepy, as in the Polar Express or Beowulf, or the too-quick movements of Spidey in the first Spider-Man film reading as false.

Another big issue is that the movie, at least from the trailer, does not appear to follow the novel. The book was a thoughtful series of anecdotes that painted a picture of the devastating worldwide zombie epidemic done ten years after the war ended. The movie looks to be Brad Pitt Vs. The Zombies (and that's a title that would read better if it were Bruce Campbell Vs.The Zombies).